hosted by: AskPat 6 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody? Welcome to Episode 6 of the AskPat podcast. I am Pat Flynn. And I'm here to answer your online business and blogging questions daily. And this episode is brought to you by NicheSiteDuel.com.
This is a website that I built to help organize your niche site creation. It's 100 percent free. There's a form there as well. And an amazing community, and, you know you can actually track one of your keywords that you're targeting for your website. Absolutely free. We've hooked up with another company to do that. So check it out: NicheSiteDuel.com.
Today's question is from Jacques. And he asks about ranking your website for multiple keywords. So let's hear his question.
Jacques: Hey Pat, Jacques Hopkins here from Louisiana. Pat, thanks so much for what you do. I was trying to figure out how I found you originally and it turns out that I think . . . I can trace it back to reading Leo Babauta's blog over at Zen Habits, which I've been reading for a long time. And, it's funny how certain things kind of lead you to one thing, which leads you to another, to another, to another. And so, I think Leo's blog led me at some point to Mark Sisson who lead me to Jimmy Moore, who lead me to Abel James, who lead me to Dean Dwyer. Who I believe is . . . who led me to you when you were on his podcast. That's the first time I'd heard about you and I've been following your stuff ever since.
So since I've followed you stuff Pat, I've started my website at Pianoin21Days.com, where I teach a pretty unique piano learning method, that gives people pretty fast results. So my question today is about SEO for multiple keywords. So I'm pretty new to SEO. I'm still trying to learn a bit about it. But I have had some success with the keyword search term, “learn piano fast.”
As of this recording if you type learn piano fast into Google, my website, pianoin21days.com, is the top result on the second page. But I also want to rank high with terms like, “learn piano online,” and “piano for beginners,” etc. So, I've optimized my home page for “learn piano fast.” But what are some techniques to optimize for the multiple search terms like I said?
So, thanks again Pat. So much of the success of my website can be attributed to things I learned from you. Cheers.
Pat Flynn: Jacques, thank you so much for your question. This is a great question for everybody out there. I mean, a lot of us know that we want to rank our home page or our root domain for one specific primary keyword. But how do we rank our website for other keywords?
Well, our website naturally is going to rank for a lot of a long-tail keywords over time. The more content you create. The more you write. The more you hit the publish button. The more key words you're going to rank, or just naturally over time. You might get to a point where you're getting thousands of visits from thousands of different keywords. Each of those keywords or key phrases being four to eight, sometimes even more words, in length. Because those are just things that you've naturally typed in your articles that people are searching for naturally in a search engine.
And, you might only get one to five hits from those. But they do add up. And I will say that the best strategy there . . . and what I'm talking about is just write more. Publish more. You're going to find that you're going to have more people coming your way the more you publish. It's just naturally what happens. But how do you rank your website for a lot of these, you know, more competitive keywords that are one to three words in length?
Now I will say that I'm taking a page off of CopyBlogger's example. And I'm actually implementing this strategy, and it's working really well. So what CopyBlogger does . . . if you go to CopyBlogger.com, Brian Clark's site. Great site, great content. I recommend that you subscribed if you haven't already. You'll see on the right hand side if you click on articles or you go to his blog, you'll see on the right hand side, that there's a list of just two words or one word that are, that are keywords that I know his site is targeting.
For instance, you'll see right here, it says, “See each resource below. Content marketing. Copywriting. SEO copywriting.” These are all different links that I could click on. “Email marketing. Keyword research. Landing pages. And internet marketing.” And, when I search for each of those keywords in Google, Brian Clark's site, CopyBlogger, gets really close to the top. Sometimes number one.
So, for “content marketing,” for example, he's at the top of page two. But for “copywriting” he is on the first page right there at the top. “SEO copy writing,” he's number one. “Email marketing,” which is an extremely competitive keyword, he’s ranking number nine. So he's on the first page. For “keyword research.” For Brian Clark's site, Copyblogger, “keyword research,” he's ranking number three. For “internet marketing,” number six. For “landing pages,” he's in the number two position. These are obviously words that he's targeting. And he's doing it in this way: he's creating landing pages for each of these top keywords.
So let's click on “landing pages” for example. And of course you're listening to this so you're not going to be able to see this. But I recommend you go to copyblogger.com, click on articles or blog that's going to take you to his blog page. And on the right hand side, you'll see a list of these keywords that he's targeting.
When you click on these keywords you go to a page. On the very top it says, “Landing pages.” And then it's written very specific for people who are interested in landing pages. Of course this is written for people as well as search engines. And there's a few key things I want to mention here. It mentions the keyword a number of times in the beginning. Not too many times, but again, just naturally. Because you want to write for people. Google and search engines are trying to be as human as possible. So you want to write for humans.
But at the same time if you do that, you will get ranked. And the reason this is ranked . . . and, you know . . . it does deliver a lot high-quality information about landing pages. It takes you to more resources on CopyBlogger. So it has that internal linking structure which is really important. And which is why sites like Wikipedia do so well. Even though it's just basic content. There's no images hardly on a lot of those. Or, you know, sometimes there's images. But, you know, it's a very basic sort of article on Wikipedia for certain items. But they rank really high. Because they have a great internal linking structure.
And most importantly, especially on CopyBlogger, you'll see that a lot of these pages, each of these landing pages, have a high number of social sharing on them. So, this one for example, has been tweeted 622 times, Facebook liked 265, Google Plus 158. And you know it's just optimized for that one specific keyword. Landing pages. Or email marketing. Or, SEO copywriting. The sidebar is gone. It's a landing page where people just go here and they get the information they need. That's why Google loves it.
And I've implemented the same strategy. So, actually, if you click on Google. If you go to Google and you look up “affiliate marketing,” Smart Passive Income is ranking number six for affiliate marketing. Because I've created a specific landing page for people that takes them to a page all about affiliate marketing. And on this page I give them affiliate marketing strategies. I talk about the basics of affiliate marketing. And then I take them through some special links, just like CopyBlogger does, all around my website that has to do with affiliate marketing.
So again, that internal linking structure, this page . . . oh, actually I'm looking at it right now. It doesn't have a way to share it, and that's a mistake. So I will admit that mistake and implement that right away. But if you go on my site, you actually can get to these specific landing pages that I'm targeting if you go to the home page, SmartPassiveIncome.com. Right below where it says, “Let's see what works,” you'll see really small hyperlinks to these pages. And these pages get visited quite a bit for these sort of secondary keywords that I'm targeting. My primary keyword is “passive income” and I rank one or two depending on what day it is for that one. Because Wikipedia likes to jump in there on number one as well.
But, for terms like “affiliate marketing” and “lifestyle design” and “podcasting tutorial”—like, those things I'm actually ranking for. Because I'm using this resource page strategy. Totally giving CopyBlogger the credit for all this, and as far as how this strategy works. But it works really well.
Get a keyword that you're targeting. You can use a tool like SEMrush or the Google Adwords keyword tool, which isn't around anymore, so you can use the GAT, a Google keyword planner or the keyword tool. That's the name of the new one. Or you can use a tool like Long Tail Pro, or Market Samurai to discover what keywords you should be targeting which ones have sort of high search volume. And then you can target those by creating a landing page just for those. Pour great information, a lot of value into that page, linked to other pages on your site that talk about those things.
And over time, especially if you can get people landing on that page and sharing it, you're going to see it start to rank much higher. And you'll start to rank your own site using those resource pages. Those secondary pages that target those secondary keywords. You'll be able to use that as a way to rank for those other keywords.
So hopefully that helps you, Jacques, and everybody else out there listening. Thank you so much for your question. You're going to get an AskPat t-shirt sent your way for having your question featured. If you have a question out there and you'd like it featured here on the show, send your question through the voicemail airwaves at AskPat.com. If your question gets featured, I'll send you an email and you'll get a t-shirt. And also you'll be helping everybody else out who has that same question as well.
Thank you so much much. Look forward to seeing you in the next episode.
As a reminder, don't forget to check out NicheSiteDuel.com. And, again, if you have a question that you'd like answered on the show, head on over to AskPat.com. And the quote of the day that I want to leave you with comes from our good friend Neil Patel from Quicksprout. He says, “Headlines matter. No matter how good your content is, if you can't write attractive headlines, no one will read your content.” So just think about that. Because all this SEO stuff, it's great, but when people come to your site, you know, you got to capture their attention to help them read further into your site. And then become a fan. And then become a customer.
Thanks so much. I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat.